Businesses, or other commercial entities, that sell products and/or services may acquire information regarding potential customers, clients or business associates from several sources. For example, information regarding a potential customer, client or business associate, referred to herein as a “lead,” may be shared among related businesses. Alternatively, leads may be acquired through marketing efforts by the business, such as radio advertisements, Internet advertising or seminars where lists of leads are produced through the marketing efforts. Additionally, leads may be acquired from other sources, such as, but not limited to, newspapers, magazines, trade journals and/or websites. Leads may be acquired in any of these manners, or in other manners, by lead brokers that specialize in compiling leads and selling the leads to other entities. Thus, leads may be acquired from various sources.
The information included in a lead commonly includes contact information regarding the potential customer, such as a telephone number, residential address and/or email address. However, depending on the source of the lead, this contact information may be incomplete or incorrect, thus making the task of contacting the lead difficult. For example, if a lead does not include a telephone number or includes an incorrect telephone number for the potential customer, the business may need to do further research locating the correct phone number or may not be able to contact the potential customer. If the contact information is missing or incorrect in a lead, the business potentially loses not only costs associated with acquiring the lead, but also costs associated with attempting to contact the lead and/or researching the correct contact information for the lead.
Depending on the source of leads, a lead list may comprise one or more leads that include information that does not accurately correspond with the potential customer. For example, businesses or lead brokers may acquire leads through marketing efforts wherein a potential customer provides contact information in exchange for free or discounted products or services. However, potential customers often realize that by providing their contact information, there is a possibility that later communications from the business, lead broker or other entity to which the contact information is sold may be received. Accordingly, if a potential customer does not want to risk any subsequent contacts, the potential customer may provide a false name, address and/or other contact information to the business or lead broker. Alternatively, the potential customer may not provide any telephone, address and/or other contact information. Accordingly, leads comprising this missing and/or inaccurate information do not provide the business using the lead with information that allows them to contact the potential customer and, thus, are of little or no value to the business.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,271,313 discloses a system and method of enhancing leads by determining propensity scores. The patent discloses a method in which a client transmits one or more lead records to a lead enhancement module that is configured to enhance the received lead records and return enhanced lead records to the client. The lead enhancement module may return a contactability score for each lead record, indicating a likelihood that the individual identified in the lead may be contacted using the contact information provided in the lead record and/or additional contract information located by the lead enhancement module. The lead enhancement module may also receive additional data items associated with leads from one or more data sources. Additionally, statistical models that may be customized for each client may be applied to information associated with lead records in order to determine one or more propensity scores for each of the lead records, where a propensity score indicates a likelihood that an individual will take a particular action, such as purchasing particular goods or services.
While such lead enhancement is beneficial, it is time consuming to enhance a large batch of leads, and it is cumbersome to modify to provide targeted and specific results which are beneficial to the client. It would therefore be beneficial to provide a system and method of enhancing a lead exchange process which, in real-time, calculates a quality index, and thus quality measure, of a lead or plurality of leads within the lead exchange process, thereby enhancing the quality of the leads supplied to the customer.